Books by Arturo Longoria

Sunday, June 5, 2011

The Trail

My latest novel The Trailhas been released in an online version through Amazon Books. It's a story I think a lot of woods roamers, bushcrafters, and lovers of adventure and the wilderness will enjoy reading. Below is a synopsis followed by the first few chapters and then a link directly to Amazon Books. The Kindle App is available free to install on your iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android, and other mobile devices as well as your personal computer. Of course, your Kindle Reader has the application built in.

The Trail synopsis:

A young man sets out to reclaim his life in an age when all seems lost and the memories of former times reduced to stories as foreign and distant as the artifacts that line crumbling highways and fill deserted towns. With the aid of a Lakota Indian he learns the woodcraft skills that help him survive on his journey through the wilderness. A tale of resolve and tenacity in the midst of ceaseless adversity,The Trailspeaks of hope and friendship and the will to persevere even as life itself seems determined to foil the simplest pleasures.

The Trail is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any semblance to actual persons, living or dead, business, companies, particular incidents or any local is entirely coincidental.

Part One

1

He leaned against a wooden post that was once the corner of a long fence but now stood like a solitary beacon hinting of times gone and barely remembered. Around him ebbing sunlight cast scraggly yellow slivers deep into the crowding blackness as nighttime prowled through the woods. Far off he heard a yodel dog call. And in the trees nearby an owl hooted; its baritone voice resonated against mesquites and ebonies held still beneath a wintry sky. How long? He wondered. Two days, the cottontail rabbit? But he could not remember so he laid back and placed his rucksack under his head then tried not to think of the hunger gnawing within him.

North by northwest he walked tracing a blue norther’s fringe and shadowing a trail of asphalt shards and sand filled cracks from which emerged stunted cevalia, golondrina and purple sage. Far from windmills and town sites and all other places where people staked temporary claims; he walked beyond eyesight of pilgrims and wagoners who plodded the tar-ridden stubble as if it was still real and viable and who embraced their blindness of what had become true as if it were a holy writ.

Nights were long and covered with frost, the sun of short duration. He drank the muddy water from potholes filled when the frigid bellies of somber gray clouds burst above him. When he paused it was amidst thorn brush and cactus. Small fires and little smoke, a frayed green parka as cover. And suffered tortured sleeps huddled within the company of nebulous shadows that cried with the voices of those who would never return.

His name was Jacob. Raised in south Texas a mile from the Rio Grande and two miles from the town of La Casita where on main street dozens of cars and trucks sat as if their owners had gone to shop and never returned. Flat tires, broken windshields, bumpers stolen, and seats removed. It appeared from a distance as if they held in the unison of their silent rows a tether on a life long past. But few complained. It was as if a resignation, as thick as the oil settling in rusted pans and dripping in slow cadences along the sand swept streets, had settled firmly into the collective spirit of the living. Even so, he could imagine how it was in the former times when the cars rolled and honked and made noises that some missed in a strange sort of way. The stories, like ballads sung over and again said the jobs had played out when the industries folded because water was scarce and could be had only by those who could afford it. Then a sickness came and fires roamed the world and smoke blanketed the land like a fog smelling oddly of burning rope. They tried to take the guns but many remained. It was ammunition, better than gold when available, that became in short supply. There followed great stealing and robbing and people roamed the countryside like mice in a panic. Some said the law, or what little existed, was worthless because it protected only the rich who had their own sweet-water wells. So the poor made do with cisterns though more often than not they drank from the stagnant holdings of ditches and lakes that smelled of things they did not understand. Then the money, like the wells from which no sounds ascended when pebbles were dropped into them, went dry.

Not that anyone told the story exactly the same for each had someone else to blame. Or so his father had said though he too had plenty of places to throw spears and daggers. Even so, his mother remained steadfast to the scripture’s promise that all things work for good for those who love the Lord. And though Jacob did not attend a school, for they had long since closed their doors, his mother insisted he be educated. So he read books of literature, philosophy, theology and science.

Some days his mother sent him to cut nopalitos and hunt black grackles and she cooked them with enough chile del monte to nullify their gamy taste. Sometimes his father looked for the odd jobs that weren’t around because that is what everybody did.

They had a goat but it was stolen. And three chickens but they were eaten when his sister Christina married. Rafael wished his parents could have attended the wedding, but said in his heart he knew he was becoming a son and brother as well as a husband.

“They’ll make a life,” Jacob’s father said.

But twelve months afterward, and four days shy of his eighteenth birthday, gunshots rang out as he cut nopalitos behind his house. He heard his mother scream and a fear welled vaporously within him. Jacob bolted windless into the backyard and a numbing vibration rocked his head and blurred his eyes. When he awoke blood covered his face, grass and dirt stuck to his cheeks and hair, and a convoy of small yellow ants had formed leading away from him and into some other world.

He stood wobbly and in a daze walked to the door and saw his father dead in the front room. In the back room he found his mother—her hands and chest, like his face, covered in blood. He sat next to her and with eyes distant and a feeble voice she said, “There’s nothing you can do my son.” But he did not reply and felt her words brazed within him like Satan unrepentant.

Two years he stayed at his sister’s house three miles from where he and his parents had lived. The memory in his mind and the reflection of the memory on his heart both torment and guidepost.

Finally, Christina could endure no more.

“We must leave,” she said.

“Where will you go?” he asked her.

“North,” she said.

“There’s nothing north.”

“It’ll be better than here.”

“I won’t go with you.”

So on a dusty day in late March Rafael built a wagon from salvaged lumber clamped to the axle, wheels and tires of an old truck and then traded their chickens and goats for one black mule. Jacob wondered if their escape ended when a fever came upon so many in mid July. For he heard that the dying moved south into the camps and hamlets that sprang up along highways grown silent and stole whole families away in less than a fortnight.

Five months later two couples were killed as they made their way into La Casita to attend a church service. And a small ranch four miles to the east was attacked—a woman abducted, a man wounded.

There was no other choice. One day before dawn he took his things and walked away. His single shot .22 caliber rifle in hand; its bluing worn to the dull gray of seasoned metal and the stock scratched and dented. His father’s thinned machete wedged beneath his belt, and a rucksack packed with extra socks and underclothes and tin cup and a small canvas pouch filled with bullets. A two-quart canteen dangled from a strap over his shoulder.

2

Jacob stretched his back against the old corner post and tried to remember how long he’d slept. The morning was cloudless with a faint northerly breeze and speckles of frost clinging to the coyotillo and sage. There were vague recollections of a windless day under dark brooding clouds and of brief moments of consciousness in between: A readjusting of the rucksack turned pillow and of draping the green parka across his chest and pulling its hood over his face. Beyond that he recalled nothing but grayish hues and silence. Except now a cardinal he remembered had perched but for a moment on the nub of a decaying mesquite trunk twenty feet away. Its carmine feathers like red velvet so intense it muted and melded the surrounding haze into the reverie of his sleep.

He pulled his dad’s old leather wallet from his back pocket and opened it and when he saw the picture of his mother and father an endless sadness rushed through him. Her creamy skin and brown hair, blue eyes and slender nose, and the smile that seemed forever only his. His father’s brown hair and graying temples, salty mustache, brown eyes and gentle grin. He could hear his laugh and her whisper and he remembered people saying he looked just like his mother. Then he saw the photograph Christina had given him when she and Rafael left. A note written on the backside: For you my brother. Do not forget.

Jacob closed the wallet and returned it to his pant’s pocket then lifted the single shot rifle from against the corner post. He reached into the rucksack and took the canvas pouch filled with .22 bullets and fished out three. Inserted one into the rifle’s chamber and dropped the other two into his shirt pocket. Perhaps he might find a deer, he thought, though he had never seen a deer. And he began following the twisted strands of barbed-wire fence that flaked into powder when touched yet somehow remained stapled to worm-ridden juniper posts. His eyes on shadows and skyline for signs of both man and beast.

At a spot along the fence where six posts lay snapped at their bases he noticed something strange in the ground. He kicked it and it broke loose. The reflex of hardened clay like fingers bursting from a closed fist. Jacob bent and picked the object from the dirt and saw it was an old cartridge case tinged greenish-blue. He rubbed off the dirt clinging to the case and read its head-stamp:270 Win R-P. Must be very old, he thought. Then dropped the case into what once had been a woodpecker’s hole in the juniper post next to him.

He walked on and when he heard a scraping noise coming from the wheat-colored grass nearby he cocked the rifle’s bolt. His eyes narrowed as he followed the sounds through the rustling blades. Then the beast emerged, its nose pressed against the ground, its scaly tail etching a line in the soft dirt. It flicked its long ears up and held still and the rifle cracked.

The armadillo was dry and crunchy cooked as it was over an open spit. And when a cold drizzle passed overhead in the middle of the night Jacob retreated into his parka and finished off the charred bits of meat like Braille read with his teeth. By dawn small pools had formed within the rooted and dished out pits made by feral hogs, and Jacob filled his canteen and drank then sat with a rumbling stomach trying to ignore his ailing gut. Somehow he mustered what strength remained and took his rifle and again walked the fenceline, the sun breaking through gray clouds in the east.

He passed the spot where he had shot the armadillo then walked into a low area with taller mesquites and less nopal cactus. Hunger rippled into every part of him and the ground yawed back and forth. So he sat beneath a chapote tree and waited. Perhaps a rabbit might cross or maybe a javelina or feral hog. He did not think his rifle could kill a hog but if per chance a javelina appeared he would shoot it in the ear. He closed his eyes and felt himself drifting as if on the canoe Rafael would bring when they fished the Rio Grande. And from far away he heard his father’s voice.

“Papa,” Jacob whispered.

And the voice came again. “Are you all right, son?”

For a moment Jacob struggled to come back. But even as he opened his eyes and groped for his rifle and saw the man standing in front of him, he could not pull himself completely out.

“Hold on, son.” The man stepped back and held up his hand. “No reason to point that gun. Hell, I didn’t even see you till I was on you.”

“Come any closer mister and I’ll shoot.”

“I believe you, son.”

“I’m not your son.”

“Just saying I’m sorry to have bothered your nap.”

“Wasn’t napping.”

The man gestured at the rifle in Jacob’s hand. “If you plan on getting your food with that you’ll starve.” Then he combed his right hand fingers through long graying hair and with his left hand reached slowly into his jean’s pocket. He pulled out a small roll of orange colored wire then unsnapped a worn leather sheath looped into his belt and slid out a bone handled knife. He cut a section of the wire and placed the roll back in his pocket. Then squinting his eyes nearly shut he began peeling back the orange insulation exposing the wound copper strands underneath. The copper wire trailed down along his short bowed legs against faded and grass stained jeans.

“Take one end and make a loop,” he said. “Wind the end of the loop around like this into a noose. Now you’ve made a snare.”

The man held up the noosed copper wire. “Works good on rabbits and possum.”

“You don’t use a gun?” Jacob asked.

The man shrugged. “Snared a bobcat once. Tried to eat it but couldn’t get past the smell.” He wiped the knife’s blade across his tattered denim jacket then slipped the knife back into its sheath. “Good luck,” he said and reached out and laid the snare on a sage bush in front of him.

Jacob made no attempt to take it.

“You wandering out here alone?” the man asked. But Jacob did not reply.

The man scanned the brush around them and sighed. “Bad times to be traveling alone,” he said.

3

The man’s trap line meandered in and out of low and wooded ground. Of the twelve snares set one held a cottontail rabbit and the other an opossum. Darkness had fallen by the time they reached his camp hidden within a meshwork of tall mesquites. The man placed the rabbit and opossum on two flat rocks and took a handful of sticks from a small pile and dropped them on a layer of smoking ash. With the fire revived he pulled his knife and began gutting the rabbit.

“What’s your name?” Jacob asked.

“Must be wanting to tell me yours,” the man said.

“I see no reason why not.”

“Well go ahead if it makes you feel better. But names don’t count for much anymore.”

The man laid the gutted rabbit on the flat rock and picked up the opossum. Then he slit the opossum’s belly and pulled out its guts and lungs and heart and tossed them into the brush. “Damn coyotes will feast tonight,” he said. And picked up the rabbit and cut a thin line around the base of its neck and extended it towards Jacob. “Grab the ears and hold tight.”

Jacob took hold of the rabbit’s ears and the man pulled the skin off cleanly and held the bloodied hide against the firelight. “We’ll dry it and tan it and put it to good use.”

Jacob rubbed his hands in the dirt and looked out to where the man had tossed the viscera. “Thanks for showing me how to set snares,” he said. Then gathered his things and stood.

The man took another handful of sticks and dropped them into the fire. Sparks whisked upward and the dust from the ashes trundled outward. He waved off the dust. “You’re welcome to share the food. Camp by the fire if you like.”

“I’d best be off.”

The man tossed a larger stick on the fire. “What’re you looking for?” he asked.

Jacob said nothing though it came to him that perhaps what he wanted was to know something more than moments of sated belly interspersed with sleep and long periods of neither. It seemed as well that he yearned to hide, but why he did not know. He could not tell the man all of these things and said only, “The truth.”

To the man’s credit he remained quiet though after what seemed several minutes he said in a low voice, “Name’s Hawk. Charlie Hawk. Some call us Sioux but we’re Lakota.”

4

The night grew cold and far off yodel dogs cried. Close by a screech owl whistled. Now and then Charlie Hawk would belch and say, “Excuse me.” But Jacob kept to his thoughts.

Charlie Hawk finished his share of the opossum and drank water from a wooden jug. Set the jug down, breathed deeply and said, “Coyotes are having a good old time tonight.” He paused then asked, “You from around here?”

“A town near the Rio Grande,” Jacob said.

“Town got a name?”

“La Casita. Means little house.”

Charlie Hawk nodded. “Long ways ago I lived in Dakota.”

“How did you get to these woods?” Jacob asked.

“Came down the west bank of the Mississippi into Arkansas and east Texas, now here.”

Lightning pulsed to the north and the dull tympanic sound of thunder arrived seconds later. Charlie Hawk flicked his chin at a pile of brush a few feet away. “My house.”

“You’re lucky it’s been cold,” Jacob said. “If this were summer you’d be sharing those sticks with scorpions, maybe a rattler or two.”

“Well, I’ve done that already.”

Charlie Hawk patted the embers with a long stick and seemed to enjoy watching the sparks fly out.

“What brought you here?” Jacob asked.

Charlie Hawk tapped the fire again but this time seemed oblivious to the sparks. Then he said, “The big sickness, I guess.”

In the night a raw chill blew out of the northwest. And the morning sky turned albumin clear as quivering stars dropped back into the icy vacuums of space. The sun appeared like a fuzzy yolk along the horizon but one lone star to the west stayed bright as if refusing to yield to the sun’s commands. At last when the sun was full and well above the skyline did the star vanish as if plucked from space by some unseen creature. Jacob heard a cough and looked away from the campfire to see Charlie Hawk emerging from his brushy lair, a large sheepskin in his hands. He handed Jacob the skin and said, “It’ll keep you warm.” He turned and walked into the woods.

Jacob wrapped the shearling across his back and went about snapping dried branches from the small trees surrounding the camp and placing them on the fire.

When Charlie Hawk returned, he was carrying a twisted root as big around as a broom handle and as long as his arm. He wiped off the dirt covering the root and cut it into thin slices and skewered each slice onto a green stick and set the stick over the fire. The slices cracked and popped and he said, “I’ve learned a few things along the way.” Then handed Jacob a slice of the cooked root and Jacob bit off a piece and found it crunchy and tasteless but it did not upset his stomach.

“Let’s water up,” Charlie Hawk said.

They walked to an old water well a half mile from camp. Charlie Hawk moved like a weary buck pausing and sniffing the air then walking on only to pause and sniff again. “Got to be careful there’s no one else around,” he whispered.

I hope you enjoyed the sample chapters above. Now click the following link to go directly to Amazon Books and The Trail.